The largest annual industry event is this week in Las Vegas! 400+ executives in the industry will be there. Over 75 speakers inlcuding: the CEO of eHarmony, the US Federal Trade Commission, CBS News, Ashley Madison, Google, Friendfinder and others. A day on Viral Marketing was added.

BUSINESS INSIDER - Jan 10 - At the end of the day, it's all about execution, not the idea. So far HowAboutWe is a success, raising $18.5M to date and hitting ~1M users since launching in April 2010. Co-Founder Aaron Schildkrout says it has everything to do with the process. "Brian and I did everything together. We were working 90 hours a week, but if you're not willing to do that, you shouldn't launch a startup. As a company leader you have to work diligently to avoid excessive siloing, and yet the more collaborative your environment is, the more complex your structures have to be. "As CEO you have a number of responsibilities, including making sure you have the right people. Make sure your personal contributions are the overall vision and overall company management. The obvious things are that you want people who are relentlessly driven and smart. Really talented people just don’t like to work inside broken processes. It feels dumb to them. Building a great process is very hard.

WASHINGTON POST - Jan 10 - ChristianMingle is owned by the same company, Spark Networks, that owns JDate, the wildly successful Jewish dating service. Indeed, JDate has been the engine behind ChristianMingle’s “God” campaign this year. Spark has plowed revenue generated by the older, more established JDate into promoting the Christian site. ChristianMingle is now the biggest of Spark’s 28 dating sites, each for a specific subset of singles. The company says ChristianMingle is the nation’s leading Christian-based dating site, with ~8M registered members. Spark Networks' Christian dating division had revenue of $22.9M during the first nine months of 2012, an increase of 111% over the same period the year before. (Its Jewish division had revenue of $19.4M, down 5%). Spark poured ~$30M into marketing and advertising for the division, more than double the year before. Overall, Spark lost $4.45M over the first three quarters of 2012 after a loss of $503K during the same period of 2011. ChristianCafe, which says it is the only Christian-owned dating site among the major players, has a marketing tie-in with Focus on the Family, the conservative Christian group founded by author and radio preacher James Dobson. Focus on the Family once had ties with eHarmony.com and its founder, Neil Clark Warren, but eHarmony has moved away from a Christian-centric approach in a bid for a broader market.

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79% Of Girls Make The First Move Online

PRESS RELEASE - Jan 10 - New study of MySingleFriend's users reveals that 79% of girls are happy to make the first move online but 71% will leave boys hanging before returning texts. Only 29% of girls are happy to reply to dates texts immediately. 65% admitted to trying to get more information about a potential date by looking them up on Facebook before going on a date. MySingleFriend was created by TV presenter Sarah Beeny in 2005 and now has over 200,000 users in the UK. The site has also recently launched in Ireland at www.mysinglefriend.ie.

CHICAGO NOW - Jan 9 - Grouper, the new dating site or "social club" acts as a dating liason between tro interested parties. Users sign up via Facebook, Grouper scans their profiles and suggest matches and also pick the spot they'll meet at and the $20 each person pays to meet up, covers the first round of drinks. Each person brings two friends along on the date.

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eHarmony Ventures Into The Job Market

US NEWS - Jan 8 - eHarmony is ready to venture into new territory: the job market. The company plans to launch a new product that will match jobseekers and employers, allowing them to create lasting, meaningful working relationships with each other. "We know that it's 50 - 75% of all people say they're not really happy with the jobs they currently have," says Neil Clark Warren, the founder and CEO of eHarmony. "We're trying to bring to bear some of the algorithms that we've already understood from all of the work we've done on matching people for marriage." Warren says that the company hopes to launch the job-matching site in June.

PRESS RELEASE - Jan 8 - A Foreign Affair, the international dating agency, is the focus of a new reality show on The National Geographic Channel that will premiere on Saturday, January 12th, 2013 at 11:00 pm EST (9:00 pm MST). The show is entitled “Bachelors Abroad” and follows A Foreign Affair tour clients as they participate in the company’s international romance tours.

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Gaydar Closes Profile Bar And Club In Soho

GAYSTARNEWS - Jan 7 - Just days after closing its radio station, Gaydar pulls out of the nightlife business. Profile and Lo Profile, in the heart of the British capital’s gay district on Wardour Street, will shut today (7 January). They said that was so they could focus on their core digital dating brands – Gaydar and Gaydar Girls.

KNOWLEDGE WHARTON - Jan 2 - Chinese online dating has taken off and is expected to break two billion RMB ($318M) in total annual revenue by 2014, according to a recent report by Analysys International. China's One-child Policy, rapid urbanization, and the widening gender imbalance have all played major roles in increasing the online-matchmaking market size. The primary players in this space -- Jiayuan, Zhenai and Baihe -- advertise themselves explicitly as marriage websites. Zhenai, a subscription-based dating service, has ~30M users. Despite the impressive size of its user base, Zhenai is maintaining a 40% annual growth rate. Jiayuan's growth is even more staggering. Established in 2003, it acquired 63M subscribers by 2012. Earning more than 44% of the Chinese online dating sector's revenue, the NASDAQ-listed Jiayuan is the only one to have gone public. Despite their impressive growth they face two major business challenges. First, the online dating service industry in China is fragmented. The second challenge is building trust with users.

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